You know why those squirrels have turned to the Dark Side?

Global Warming, that's why.

Photo swiped from World of Wonder (so as not to leach their bandwidth). Check out their paean to Chuck Norris, with a link to the top thirty cool facts about the man I know as "Lone Wolf McQuaid." Here are a few:

*Chuck Norris built a time machine and went back in time to stop the JFK assassination. As Oswald shot, Chuck met all three bullets with his beard, deflecting them. JFK's head exploded out of sheer amazement.

* Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

* The grass is always greener on the other side, unless Chuck Norris has been there. In that case the grass is most likely soaked in blood and tears.

* Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

* A blind man once stepped on Chuck Norris' shoe. Chuck replied, "Don't you know who I am? I'm Chuck Norris!" The mere mention of his name cured this man blindness. Sadly the first, last, and only thing this man ever saw, was a fatal roundhouse delivered by Chuck Norris.

*Chuck Norris can make a woman climax by simply pointing at her and saying "booya".

* Chuck Norris is not hung like a horse... horses are hung like Chuck Norris.

* Chuck Norris is 1/8th Cherokee. This has nothing to do with ancestry, the man ate a fucking Indian.

And yes, I know that list is old, because there's already a lot of votes for the best of 'em.

Posted by: Ace at 10:31 PM | Comments (18)
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The MSM -- which prides itself on asking the "tough questions" and "getting to the heart" of a story -- is apparently incapable of asking where the hell did this guy get twenty tons of VX nerve gas?

The men tried to smuggle from Syria 20 tons of chemicals for an attack in Jordan that would have killed 80,000 people. On Sunday, the prosecution urged the judge to consider the death penalty for the men behind the largest planned WMD attack in history.

The chemicals are believed to be VX nerve gas. There were 20 tons of the weapons and explosives captured coming into Jordan from Syria. Syria doesn't make VX. Saddam Hussein's Iraq did.

Unbiased? Please. It's a 20-ton toxic elephant in the room and the media just couldn't care less.

Some questions must not be asked, for fear of an answer that hurts their agenda.

Posted by: Ace at 10:08 PM | Comments (26)
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Bat Mitzvah blowout:

For his daughter's coming-of-age celebration last weekend, multimillionaire Long Island defense contractor David H. Brooks booked two floors of the Rainbow Room, hauled in concert-ready equipment, built a stage, installed special carpeting, outfitted the space with Jumbotrons and arranged command performances by everyone from 50 Cent to Tom Petty to Aerosmith.

And not just those three. Also performing at the teenie bash: Don Henley, Joe Walsh, Stevie Nicks, Kenny G (Kenny G?). DonÂ’t believe me? HereÂ’s a snap of 'Fitty' keeping it real.

And check this blog for snaps of the other "rockers" rocking out for the assembled tween/teens.

No, IÂ’m not going to go off on the Rock-n-Roll sell-out angle. Never really believed in that, and the pictures say all I ever could anyway. Besides, Rock-n-Roll broke my heart a long time ago - been dead to me for bout a decade.

What I wonder about is her classmate. You know, the one whose kinda-not-hip parents booked the Christina Aguilera impersonator for her coming out two weeks later. (“She’s very good honey. She brings her own light show and everything!”)

Man, how much must that kid dread her upcoming shindig? Cause you just know 12 year old girls wouldnÂ’t dream of, say, later circulating a checklist comparing and contrasting the two parties in comical fashion or coming up to her in the hallway at school and asking her if she still has the impersonator's number "Cause my sister, Megan, she has her party next year (*snicker*) and we just thought it was soooo cool."

No. Cause 12 year old girls aren't catty like that.

Posted by: Dr. Reo Symes at 06:37 PM | Comments (61)
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A Democrat to make Nancy Pelosi proud!

Clement Laird Vallandigham - Copperhead

Although the Democratic party had broken apart in 1860, during the secession crisis Democrats in the North were generally more conciliatory toward the South than were Republicans. They called themselves Peace Democrats; their opponents called them Copperheads because some wore copper pennies as identifying badges. A majority of Peace Democrats supported war to save the Union, but a strong and active minority asserted that the Republicans had provoked the South into secession; that the Republicans were waging the war in order to establish their own domination, suppress civil and states rights, and impose "racial equality"; and that military means had failed and would never restore the Union.

Sound familiar?

The most prominent Copperhead leader was Clement L. Valladigham a former Ohio Congressman from Dayton, Ohio. He was also a notorious, thinly-veiled, Southern sympathizer who made speeches, to anyone who would listen, calling the war, "wicked and cruel," and which was quite obvious to all. Then however, Vallandigham strayed beyond the realm of reality and suggested that the Republicans only wanted to end slavery to further their quest for a dictatorship.

But here is the part which makes me love Lincoln so much!

On May 5, 1863, a Company of the 115th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, dispatched to Dayton, Ohio by special train, broke into Vallandigham's house at 3:00 A.M. and arrested him. The former Congressman was taken from his home in a nightshirt and quickly transported to Cincinnati where he would be tried by a military commission the following day on charges of "treasonable utterances." Riots broke out in Dayton in response to the arrest, with fires destroying an entire city block. Troops from Columbus and and Cincinnati were brought in and martial law declared. Vallandigham was soon convicted of aiding the Confederates, and on May 19, 1863 President Lincoln ordered Secretary of War Stanton to see to it that Vallandigham was banished to "beyond the military lines of the United States and not be permitted to return, under threat of arrest."

Federal troops in Tennessee turned Vallandigham over to the Confederate Army on May 25, 1863. In June, President Davis of the Confederate States, having no use for Vallandigham, orders him to Wilmington, North Carolina to be guarded as an "alien enemy." That same month. Peace Democrats in Ohio nominate the the exiled and incarcerated Vallandigham for Governor. A committee of the Democratic convention demanded that President Lincoln reverse his ordered exile of Vallandigham. Lincoln refused. "Must I," Lincoln lamented, "shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert?" In October, Vallandigham, now exiled by the Confederate States to Canada, would be defeated for the Ohio Governorship by Democrat John Brough from Marietta. On June 14, 1864, one year after being exiled, Clement Vallandigham slips back into the country and arrives in Ohio wearing a feeble disguise that fails to deceive the Federal agents watching him.

There is a happy ending though!

In June of 1871, Clement Vallandigham, defending an Ohio man charged with murder, requested a change of venue to Warren County, Ohio. There, in his hotel room at the Golden Lamb Inn at Lebanon, Ohio, Vallandigham was rehearsing his final arguments to the jury. He would suggest that his client was innocent and that the victim had actually killed himself accidentally. To demonstrate the freak accident he proposed, Vallandigham planned to pull a similar pistol from his trouser pocket to demonstrate how it might accidentally fire. While practicing his arguments in his room at the Golden Lamb, Vallandigham pulled the pistol and, ironically, it fired, sending a bullet into his abdomen at point blank range. Clement Vallandigham, the notorious Southern-sympathizer from Ohio, once banished from the Union by President Lincoln, died the next morning at the age of fifty-one.

Posted by: Tanker at 05:21 PM | Comments (18)
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Lincoln misled us into war. That whole slavery deal? Turns out it was complete bullshit, based on "cherry-picked" intelligence and "twisted" reports.

Thanks to Irwin.

Posted by: Ace at 01:19 PM | Comments (40)
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A brown star, as far as I understand it, is a gas-giant planet that never accretes enough mass to collapse into the fusion-reactors we know as actual stars. It's a would-be star that never caught fire, in other words. Sort of like Liz Phair.

I don't know if Jupiter is technically a "brown star," but Carl Sagan referred to it as "a star that failed." If only it could have gotten a little bit bigger and maybe pulled in some of Saturn's mass into it... we could have two suns, just like Luke Skywalker did on Tatooine. And how freakin' cool would that be?

And yes, I'm posting this not for the astronomical novelty of it, but chiefly for the potential Google-hits for "brown star." I'd prefer not to explain.

Thanks to Glen.

Posted by: Ace at 12:45 PM | Comments (31)
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Because Atrios would want it that way.

Posted by: Ace at 11:51 AM | Comments (31)
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Giant freakin' scorpions:

A scientist poring over 330-million-year-old tracks in a layer of sandstone in Scotland believes they were made by an extraordinary water scorpion that was as big as a man.

The huge six-legged creature was about 1.6 metres (64 inches) long and a metre (40 inches) wide, according to the study, published on Thursday in Nature, the weekly British science journal.

Giant. Freakin'. Scorpoions.

Thanks to Brad.

Posted by: Ace at 11:31 AM | Comments (57)
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10. Falling Jobless Rate Has Perverse Effect: Higher Salaries Result In Rising Labor Costs

9. Amidst Boom, A Piece of Americana Lost: Fewer Rummies Raving In The Streets

8. Rising Incomes Mean More Americans Caught By Alternative Minimum Tax; Minorities, Women Hardest Hit

7. Falling Gas Prices May Lead To Increased Greenhouse Gas Production

6. With Economic Depression Averted, Struggling Discount Hard-Liquor Manufacturers Wonder: "Where Do We Go From Here?"

5. Picking Up The Pieces: Americans Struggle To Find Quality Chinese Restaurants After Relocating To Work At Higher Paying Jobs

4. The Forgotten Victims: As Investments Shift Towards Stocks, Wall Street Bond Traders "Despondant" At Sub-100K Bonuses

3. Economists Fret At Growing "Luxury Gap" Between Filthy Rich and Filthy Stinking Rich

2. The Dark Side of Prosperity: Study Links Rising Disposable Income With Casual Drug Use, Purchase of "Upscale" Pornographic DVDs

....and the Number One Upcoming NYT Headline On The Economy...

1. Paul Krugman Stops Writing Column, Starts Pelting Well-Dressed Passers-By With His Own Feces; "Some Of His Best Work Ever," Raves The American Prospect

Posted by: Ace at 11:17 AM | Comments (6)
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Thanks to Dr. Reo Symes.

The childish pettiness of the complaints should tell you the economy's doing pretty damn well: more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:42 AM | Comments (17)
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